The Chosen Child: Adoption Book Proposal

At the suggestion of a reader, I am posting a non-fiction book proposal for a book on adoption. This proposal is ready to be turned into a book if you are an agent or publisher. Just be in touch.

Overview
Sixty percent of Americans have been touched by adoption, having either a family member or close personal friend who is adopted, has adopted or has relinquished a child for adoption. For the vast majority of these people, adoption has been a positive and life-changing event, and two-thirds of Americans hold an extremely favorable view of adoption.
Still, the general literature about adoption, both in print and on the Internet, is often seedy and negative. The tone of many memoirs of adopted people or people who have relinquished children is filled with horror stories and unsubstantiated claims:
• Adoption is akin to slavery
• Adoption is a wound from which no one can recover
• Adoptive parents of international children are "harvesting" human beings
• Adoption leads to serial killing
• Adoptive parents are more likely to kill their children
The professional literature in both psychology and history is much more balanced and positive, but not many adopted people or their families read scholarly journals or books. Still, they do want to know that their choices were and are valid, and that they are not "primally wounded," as one author of an anti-adoption book wrote.
In The Chosen Child, I will present a balanced look at adoption, primarily through the words of members of the adoption "triad" (adoptees, adoptive families and birth families). To illustrate the joy that adoption has brought, I will interview a number of celebrity adoptees and adoptive parents (see Expanded Table of Contents Chapters Two and Three). Through both internet and face-to-face interviews arranged through various adoption support groups, I will show the face of adoption in America today. Preliminary discussions with people who have been affected by adoption leads me to believe the negative, critical attacks on the practice are unwarranted and insupportable.
While 63% of Americans hold a favorable view of adoption, naysayers vastly outnumber cheerleaders in terms of books written. As shown in the Market Analysis and Comparable Books section below, non-fiction books and memoirs about adoption are generally negative, with some going as far as equating adoption with slavery and attempting to connect adoption with serial murderers. While some historians and psychologists have taken a more positive view, their audience has been more professional than general.
I will provide a brief history of adoption in America, examine some famous (and infamous) adoptees, explore models of looking at adoption, and look at the “search” phenomenon, the desire to find and make contact with biological relatives.
I expect the final manuscript to be approximately 70,000 words and to be completed by mid-August, 2005.

Comparable Books

Being Adopted: The Lifelong Search for Self by David M. Brodzinsky, Robin Marantz Henig, Marshall D. Schechter, Doubleday, 1992, Hardcover, Anchor 1993 paperback

The authors, a psychologist, a psychiatrist and a journalist, present a scholarly look at adoption. Following a model based on Erik Erikson’s Eight Stages of Personal Development, they look at adoption’s effect at each stage of a person’s life. The book is dry, and represents that 100% of adoptees “search” for their birth parents, although they broaden the meaning of the term to include “intrapsychic” searching, meaning fantasies and inner contemplation.
The Chosen Child takes a more measured and accessible approach. While including anecdotes about childhood fantasies of birth mothers—"She looked a lot like Mary Tyler Moore and would be sending a limo for me as soon as she finished shooting her current movie"—it is much more grounded in the notion that each of us can generate our own definition of success being who we are and where we are.


Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew by Sherrie Eldridge, Dell, 1999, Trade Paperback

With more than 80,000 copies in print, this book is a prime example of the “adoptee as victim” view. With chapter titles like “I Need to be Taught that I Have Special Needs Arising from Adoption Loss” and “I May Appear to be More ‘Whole’ Than I Actually Am,” this book encourages adoptees to focus on loss rather than gain, and leads adoptive parents to view their children as damaged goods.
The Chosen Child instead encourages all people to recognize that the past is prologue rather than prediction. Adoption, or any other situation, does not need to define us. We can define ourselves.

Twice Born: Memoirs of an Adopted Daughter by Betty Jean Lifton, McGraw-Hill, 1975 Hardcover, St. Martin's Griffin, 1998 Paperback

This personal memoir, which has been in print 30 years, views adoption as something unnatural and, perhaps, evil. Throughout her long and successful career, Lifton has promulgated the notion that adoptees are not quite whole unless they reunite with their birth families.
The Chosen Child instead posits that each of us has “enough” of whatever we need to create success for ourselves. While in no way critical of adoptees who choose to search for birth relatives, I take a more bemused look at the issue.

Strangers and Kin: The American Way of Adoption by Barbara Melosh, Harvard University Press 2002 Hardcover

In this grand history of adoption in America, historian Melosh uses primary sources from the state of Delaware to explore how adoption has evolved over time. Dryly written, the book is aimed at a scholarly rather than general audience.

The Privilege of Youth: A Teenager's Story of Longing for Acceptance and Friendship by Dave Pelzer, Dutton, 2004, Hardcover, Plume, 2004, Paperback

With three books currently in the New York Times Best-Selling Paperbacks List, Pelzer’s message of self-reliance and hard work has clearly found an audience. Pelzer, however, was raised by an abusive alcoholic mother until the age of 12, and then placed into foster care. The Chosen Child has the same uplifting message, but is focused on a more traditional adoptive setting.

Adoption Nation: How the Adoption Revolution Is Transforming America by Adam Pertman, Basic Books, 2000 Hardcover, Basic Books 2001Paperback

A former Boston Globe reporter, where he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on adoption, and current head of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, Pertman gives a combination of personal history as an adoptive father and journalistic research into the history and current state of adoption in America. Clearly favoring open adoption, in which the birth mother has some contact with the adopted child and family, Pertman presents a balanced view, although his book is aimed at social historians and policy makers, rather than a general audience.
The Chosen Child is a readable overview that will appeal to a general audience. While drawing upon the work of such writers as Pertman and Melosh, I am not an academic.

Marketing

The market for a positive look at adoption is large, wealthy and well educated.
• Up to 100 million Americans have been directly affected by adoption. It is reasonable to assume that a large number of these people have touched other lives in a significant way (e.g., spouses, boy/girlfriends, co-workers) and would provide referrals for an upbeat look at this experience.
• In 2000, families with adopted children earned $56,00, 17% more than families with biological children.
• Families with adopted children are 21% more likely to have a bachelor's degree and 33% more likely to have a graduate or professional degree.
• Because they have generally been vetted by a social service or other agency, and have incurred up to $50,000 in their search for a child, adoptive parents are committed parents.
This large market of wealthy readers has been under-served in its need for validation of its choice to adopt. The Chosen Child is a book that meets a definite desire and need.

Table of Contents

1) How It Used to Be: A Very Brief History of Adoption
2) Who’d Give Away Faith Hill or Steven Jobs? Celebrity Adoptees
3) Wow! My Parents Are Rich and Famous
4) You Broke My Heart, So I Busted Your Skull: Adoption and Serial Killing
5) Damaged Goods: The Victimification of Just About Everybody
6) Adoption = Slavery: Hyperbole at Its Finest
7) Finding the Grail—And How Holy Was It? Successful Searches for Birth Parents or Relinquished Children
8) I Know She’s Out There Somewhere: Unsuccessful Searches
9) Staring into an Open Grave: The Dead Parent or Child
10) A Certain Desire for Salty Foods: Birth Siblings
11) It Don’t Matter to Me: Adoptees Who Don’t Search Out of a Sense of Wholeness
12) It Would Kill Mom If She Found Out: Adoptees Who Don't Search Out of a Sense of Guilt
13) It Should Be Enough that I Didn't Abort: Birth Parents Who Don't Want to be Found

14) What’s the Romanian Word for Relinquish?: International Adoptions

15) Do I Need to Buy a Birth-Father’s Day Card? Open Adoption

16) What It All Comes Down To: A Conclusion


Expanded Table of Contents



1) How It Used to Be: A Very Brief History of Adoption

Before the 1930s, adoption was often informally arranged, and the notion of confidentiality was not considered. Any party in the adoption could find out the names of all the other parties. With the rise of social work as a profession, this informality was swept aside, in favor of state approval of each adoption and the anonymity of the people involved. While the number of annual adoptions peaked in 1970 at 175,000, it has seen a recent increase, particularly in international adoptions. Likewise, such organizations as Bastard Nation and AbolishAdoption have raised a voice of criticism of the practice.

2) Who’d Give Away Faith Hill or Steven Jobs? Celebrity Adoptees

While Dave Thomas was the most public and vocal spokesman about his adopted roots, celebrities from a variety of fields are adopted. To illustrate the adoptees experience, I will interview many of the following adopted celebrities: Debbi Harry, Jim Palmer (who is an adoptive father as well), Eric Dickerson, Daunte Culpepper, Faith Daniels, Edward Albee, Bo Diddley, Ray Liotta, Jack Nicholson, Damien Hurst, Melissa Gilbert, Antwone Fisher, Greg Louganis, Scott Hamilton, Lee Majors, Liz Phair, Jett Williams and Michael Reagan. Additionally, the lives of Truman Capote, Dave Thomas, John Lennon, J.R.R. Tolkien and Babe Ruth will be explored.

3) Wow! My Parents Are Rich and Famous

Adoptive parents have won Oscars, Emmys and World Championships. They are members of three different Halls of Fame. Because of the personal nature of the adoption experience, I will interview many of the following adoptive parents: Angelina Jolie & Billy Bob Thornton, Barbara Walters, Burt Reynolds, Dan Marino, Diane Keaton, George Lucas, Jamie Lee Curtis & Christopher Guest, Jill Krementz & Kurt Vonnegut, Jim Palmer, Joan Didion & John Gregory Dunne, Kate Jackson, Kirby Puckett, Kirstie Alley & Parker Stevenson, Magic Johnson, Nicole Kidman & Tom Cruise, Paul Newman & Joanne Woodward, Sally Jessy Raphael, Sen. Gordon Humphrey, Sen. John McCain, and Stephen Spielberg.


4) You Broke My Heart, So I Busted Your Skull: Adoption and Serial Killing

In addition to the celebrities profiled in the previous two chapters, some infamous people have been adopted. Such murderers as David Berkowitz (Son of Sam), Ken Bianchi (Hillside Strangler and Joel Rifkin were adopted. A small but significant number of true-crime authors argue for a causal relationship between adoption and serial killing. Here, this argument is presented, along with a critical response.

5) Damaged Goods: The Victimification of Just About Everybody

The victim mentality maintains that adopted people and the biological parents who relinquished them are broken for life and need an eternity of “healing.” Money quote: “Adoption loss is the only trauma in the world where the victims are expected by the whole of society to be grateful.”—Unattributed posting on anti-adoption activist Lori Corangelo abolishadoption.com Web site. I expect to interview Ms. Corangelo along with the founders of Bastard Nation, which likens adoption to slavery.

6) Adoption = Slavery: Hyperbole at Its Finest

An argument put forth primarily by women who relinquished children and now regret their decision. The working model here is that their babies were harvested from them when they were young and unwise. This argument will be presented, along with a critical response.

7) Finding the Grail—And How Holy Was It?: Successful Searches for Birth Parents or Relinquished Children

Many adult adoptees have expended huge amounts of money and energy searching for birth parents or siblings. This chapter will consist of five to ten interviews with adoptees that have made contact with birth parents or siblings. Interview subjects will be found both on the Internet and through local newspaper advertising.

8) I Know She’s Out There Somewhere: Unsuccessful Searches

Five to ten interviews with adoptees currently searching for birth families.

9) Staring into an Open Grave: The Dead Parent or Child

Five to ten interviews with adoptees who discover their birth parents (or children) have died.

10) A Certain Desire for Salty Foods: Birth Siblings

Five to ten interviews with adoptees who have reunited with birth siblings

11) It Don’t Matter to Me: Adoptees Who Don’t Search Out of a Sense of Wholeness

Five to ten interviews with adoptees who express no interest in searching for birth family.

12) It Would Kill Mom If She Found Out: Adoptees Who Don't Search Out of a Sense of Guilt

Five to ten interviews with adoptees who would like to search for birth family, but are concerned about hurting the feelings of their families.


13) It Should Be Enough that I Didn't Abort: Birth Parents Who Don't Want to be Found

Five to ten interviews with birth parents who relinquished their children and have no desire for contact to be made.



14) What’s the Romanian Word for Relinquish?: International Adoptions

Over the last three decades, more than a quarter-million children have been adopted from abroad. This chapter will interview five to ten families who have adopted internationally and examine the challenges for international adoptees who want to search for their birth parents.

15) Do I Need to Buy a Birth Father’s Day Card? Open Adoption

Open adoption, in which the birth parent(s) maintain some form of communication with the children they relinquish, has become more popular over the past decade. This chapter will consist of interviews with five to ten families involved in open adoption.

16) What It All Comes Down To: A Conclusion

About the Author

Keith Howard is a writer, educator and entertainer. A nominee for European Military Journalist of the Year, Keith has published numerous op-ed pieces and essays on topics ranging from baseball to education to family issues. He began his career as a print journalist, writing straight news, features and a humor column, then moved into radio and theater.
For eight years, he directed and acted with the Clearway Improvisational Theater, which performed before more than 100,000 people nationwide. He is comfortable as a public speaker and has numerous appearances to his credit.
From 1988 until 2004, Keith ran alternative high schools, until leaving education to pursue a writing career. An active member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators, Keith has completed a young adult novel and an adult novel. He is currently working on a second young adult novel.
Keith lives in Nashua, New Hampshire, with his three daughters, two guinea pigs and a rabbit.

Writing Sample
It’s not often that the mail changes my life. Phone bills, supermarket flyers and invitations to further extend my already fragile credit are fine in their way, but they don’t lead to introspection and meditation. A while ago, though, I received a letter that did just that, hitting me like a meatball between the eyes.
Oddly, the envelope itself inspired dread, bearing the return address of the probate court in my hometown. Given that my life to this point has been criminally unremarkable, I assumed the envelope contained either a reminder of a long-forgotten debt or the news that my high school had reviewed its records and that my diploma had been revoked.
Instead, I found a pleasant letter from the probate judge telling me that a stranger and her social worker had found she and I had the same biological mother, she too had been placed for adoption at birth and she wanted to make contact with me.
As an adopted person, I’ve never used a phrase like “as an adopted person,” so the whole premise struck me as surreal. I’ve never really cared who my biological mother was. Instead, I’ve focused on what kind of father my children will have. Still, strange or not, I did have to respond to the request, so I wrote the following:
Dear Judge Cassavechia:
For the past 15 years I have spent my days helping adolescents with emotional difficulties recognize that their existence can offer meaning and purpose. I spend the rest of my life in nurturing and encouraging the search for meaning with my children. Life, for me, is filled with significance and purpose, with meaning pooling up like sunlight on a sheet of foil. Although I am a terrible poet, I do have poetic vision, with an ability to find connections between seemingly isolated objects and events. It is therefore very difficult for me to admit that I find meaningless the existence of a woman borne by the same woman who bore me. I find that I have no particular emotional response to this fact, nor any curiosity about this woman or her mother.
I am not a very philosophical man, at least in the sense of having a systematic belief system. In the choice between immanence and transcendence, I always choose the present and concrete over the ethereal and otherworldly. As H.L. Mencken remarked about philosophy in general, “We are here. It is now. The rest is all moonshine.” Because of this unusual situation, I have pondered and outlined a rough draft of a philosophy of life. This process has crystallized a number of previously unexpressed first principles. Please excuse the length of this letter, but I hope to make my intentions explicitly clear to you, the involved party from the State of New Hampshire and, most important, the woman who initiated this.
If I were asked to define myself by coming up with a list of 100 descriptive attributes, the list might begin with:
1. I am a father.
2. I am a teacher.
3. I am funny.
And so on, moving down toward the following:
37. I am a Red Sox fan.
38. I am a chess player who enjoys playing against superior competition, of which there is no shortage.
39. I am an Army veteran.
And conclude with:
98. I am a coffee drinker.
99. I worked my way through college and graduate school.
100. I am a good cook.
This hypothetical list, though, would probably not include the item “I am adopted,” for this fact forms almost none of my core identity.
When I do meet people who view their adoption as central to their humanity, I am vaguely amused, for adoption has had little significance in my life. Since our conversation, I have done a little Internet research into the world of adoption, primarily through reading postings at newsgroups devoted to the subject. I was shocked to find that thousands of people appear to devote considerable energy to tracking down biological parents, children and siblings. Most of the postings have a desperate, Holy Grail tone to them, as if successful detective work would somehow make the searcher whole.
Perhaps I have chosen massive denial as a strategy of coping with adoption, but the notion that one’s life is given purpose by the pursuit of another strikes me as pathetic and absurd. Pathetic because this is a sucker’s game: the elusive quarry is almost certainly not going to grant peace and serenity. Absurd because the random occurrence of a blood relationship guarantees no connection more profound than perhaps a certain physical similarity or a taste for salty foods.
Many of us have had the experience of traveling overseas and meeting someone who comes from the same state or region. This coincidence forms a short-lived bond that melts fairly quickly if there is no other connection to be made. Thus it is with adoption and me. Meeting someone who is adopted or interested in adoption is roughly akin to meeting a fellow New Englander in Vienna. I am interested enough to talk a bit, but the topic wears itself out fairly quickly. I would shy away from someone calling out in Heathrow Airport, “Hey, I’m from New Hampshire. Any other New Englanders here?” Similarly, adopted people using that fact as a calling card put me on guard.
Although I don’t much like labels, I believe some things that might be called “existentialist,” although they might just as easily be called common-sense conservatism.
First and foremost, I believe that what we do defines who we are. The “I” in each of us is the product of our experiences, those events which life has thrown at us, and, more important, our response to those events. Each situation in our lives offers the opportunity for choice and it is the patterns of those choices which create our identity. Without wanting to sound mechanistic, a human life is that set of patterns and rhythms created by the choices we make. Identity is the product of our responses to the chaotic events which life churns up over time.
This identity is being continually created, of course, so it also affects the choices we confront in our lives. As an example, a young person who is offered the opportunity to cheat on a test has at least two choices: politely refuse the offer or cheat.
If the young person takes the first choice, he discovers that he is becoming the sort of person who doesn’t cheat. The people around him are also learning this, so they are less likely to offer him the chance to cheat. This self-stoking cycle applies just as strongly in regard to positive options. We are always in a state of becoming who we are. There is no static “I,” there is a dynamic, ever-changing, and, one hopes, ever-improving “I.”
This philosophy leads directly to my feelings about my biological mother. My view of life is that each of us is born with certain biological strengths and limitations. The vast majority of us have “enough” of everything we need to be successful. The secret to that success doesn’t come, except in the case of professional basketball players and midget wrestlers, from the biology with which we are born, but from the psychology and sociology of our parents, which enables us to make good choices later in our lives. In the battle between nature and nurture, my money is on the importance of nurture.
For example, I was born with a brain capable of learning a lot of different information. My mother was a voracious reader who encouraged me to read broadly, deeply and until my eyes dried out. Whether I was reading comic books or Kafka, she urged me to read and think about what I was reading.
Likewise, I was born with potentially adequate hand-eye coordination and a body that would be capable of running fast. My father, who was a high-school phenom, drove me to baseball, soccer and track practice and attended every single one of my childhood and high school games, meets and tournaments, whether I was starting or riding the bench. In each of these examples, and in countless more, I was born with certain potential gifts and abilities but it was the nurturance of my parents and others who breathed reality into that potential.
If we can use the analogy of cards, my biological mother dealt half of my hand and left the table. It was my parents who taught me to play. In terms of influence on my life, my biological mother’s role is considerably less than that of my second-grade teacher, my old soccer coach, or even the friendly cashier at the local supermarket. In fact, if you had contacted me with information about Ben Roe, my elementary-school best friend, with whom I have not spoken since he moved away 35 years ago, my emotional response would have been immeasurably greater than it is under the present circumstances.
The difference between my relationship with the people mentioned above and my relationship with my biological mother is that I interacted with them, while I justresulted from an action of my biological mother, an almost certainly unintended consequence.
I have three young daughters, each of whom is wonderful in her own unique way. In a sense, I had nothing to do with which girl would have blue eyes, which would be left-handed and which would have dimples. I could not have chosen different attributes, for I had no choice. In fact, during the act that led to conception, babies were certainly far from my mind. I became my daughters’ father when I started to father them at birth, a dynamic and ongoing process. Until then, I was just a sperm supplier. By this light, my biological mother has had zero influence on who I am, for she had no control or influence over which genes she was passing on to me.
As a father, I know that the look I give when smiling into my eight-year-old’s face is the same look of love my father gave me when I was adopted. I love my children because of the time I spend with them and the dreams I have for them and because of the great people they are becoming, not because they are flesh of my flesh or bone of my bone.
In short, my need to find out more about the man who sired and the woman who bore me is nil. Nada. Zilch. With no bitterness or animosity toward either of them, and with thankfulness that neither of them appears to have passed on genes for madness or early-onset Alzheimer’s, I would say that I have no desire to discover these people. You have informed me that both my biological mother and father are dead. May they rest in peace.
Given that my need to establish any kind of contact is non-existent, I must consider those of my biological mother’s daughter, or my biological half-sister. While it is difficult for me to conceive of any questions that my identity could answer for this woman, the fact that she has initiated this process clearly indicates that she believes that finding me will be helpful to her.
My first response is that if she wishes to discover more about herself, she should start with a mirror. Likewise, if she wishes to discover more about her mother, that same mirror could be used to search for her mother’s effects on her. Still, I have no objection to some minimal amount of contact, as long as the following requests are accepted. I request that my biological half-sister
1. Understand that I am not her “long-lost brother.” I am a person who shares some genes with her,
2. Understand that I have no desire to enter a long-term relationship with her or any of her relatives,
3. Understand and respect my desire for privacy, and
4. Understand that I am a writer and that I may choose to write about this experience and publish these writings, promising to protect the anonymity of her and her mother.
As a practical matter, I would prefer that you forward me this woman’s name, telephone number and a convenient time to call. I will make every effort to place a phone call and to try to arrange for at least one face-to-face meeting.
Thank you, Your Honor, for your interest in this case. Until I hear from you, I remain
Sincerely yours,
Did I contact this woman? Yes.
Did we have a pleasant conversation? Yes.
Did I rethink my position as stated above, and become friends with this woman? No, not at all.
In fact, that is how the letter changed my life: it showed that I didn’t need to change my life all that much.